Daily Discovery

December 31: Happy New Year's Eve! And a happy 2019 to everyone - when I'm ringing in the New Year tonight .. it will be early morning for most of the people reading this. It's strange to think that besides being on the other side of the world, we will be a year apart for most of the day.

I'm not alone, though, this year, and it's a lot of fun celebrating and preparing for 2019. We spent the day walking around Wuwei and seeing a few of the sites (and restaurants) that I love (the beautiful photo of the pagoda just below this text was taken by my friend Krista!). Later, my friends shared some of their traditions, including having 12 round fruits on New Years Eve (symbolizing prosperity and good things for the next 12 months. We played cards, ate a ton of snacks, watched the celebrations from other countries in this time zone on a friend's iPad, and spent the first 15 minutes of 2019 taking selfies - more time already than I spent in 2018 on that activity.

Here are the results (and memories) of a great evening with friends - I'll leave this post up for a few days and start with the January Discoveries a few days into 2019 to make sure that people who are interested have a chance to see them all!

December 29: I have some great students - it's a common refrain for my Daily Discovery posts, and for my service.

Today, a student was out getting dinner and wanted to share with me, so she bought me a sweet potato, too. After finishing hers, she sends me a message: "Teacher, come down stairs, I'm here. I give to you." It's really too nice, and it's a great dinner: roasted sweet potatoes are sold throughout the city on the street corners from the beds of little trucks or from little pop-up shops. And the sweet potatoes are more of a yellow color than the orange I remember from Thanksgivings at home. It's quite delicious, though.

Luckily, I also had something to share today; I made some banana bread today, and shared that with my students, who also loved it. Friendship. Food. Culture. Exchange!

December 27: I must admit that one of the greatest differences between my college life in the US and the college life here in Wuwei revolves around the usage of phones... not so much that one place uses them more or less, but of how accessible and easy to use they are.

In the dorms in the US, you generally always have heating, lighting and electricity. In China, my students have lighting and electricity only for a few hours in the morning, at noon, and at night - I'm guessing less than 6 hours a day maximum. So for students in a society that uses phones to do just about everything (communication, entertainment, shopping, paying money to vendors and shops), it can be difficult to ensure that your phone has enough battery.

Most students have a portable battery pack that they use during the day, but others take a more innovative approach, as long as the teacher doesn't care (I generally don't, but I imagine other teachers might). One of my students always charges her phone .. sometimes via USB with the computer, other times from the one outlet in the back of the room, and tonight .. from the elevated outlet by the computer using the double chair technique. I don't mind .. at least I know she's paying attention to class and not her phone!

December 25: Merry Christmas!

It's my second Christmas in China, and my second away from home .. I don't think it gets much easier being away from family on these special days, but this year I was able to spend more time with my family here at school: my students.

In the afternoon, I invited my class over to bake some cookies, watch a movie, eat snacks and play cards (Uno), and it was a lot of fun!

In the evening, my other class and I went to eat hot pot together, and then returned to bake more cookies, eat snacks, play cards ... and they put together the little gingerbread house kit that my parents sent me. It was a great Christmas - and I hope yours was, too.

Oh, yeah, and some impromptu "ice skating" on the road back to school.

December 23: I met a student this weekend after the English Dubbing Competition, and he brought up independently that he was a Christian, and invited me to go to his church with him today to celebrate Christmas. (He told me that the Christmas celebrations are all today, because the government doesn't like Christmas on the weekdays, so they moved it to the weekend.)

We went to the church (I think it was a Calvinist church? Though I have little real idea of what that means in a Chinese context), and I was surprised to see how similar it was (in appearance) to my church at home with the dual TVs posted on the wall in order to show hymns and readings.

That's about where the similarities ended, though. It started at 8 am. There was a bit of singing, but no communion, no altar, a lot of praying individually aloud at the same time, and a 90 minute (what I interpreted to be) sermon, before coming to a close around 11:30 am.

I'm not sure if I will go back (mostly because I understood somewhere around 15% of what was being said), but it was a good experience before Christmas truly arrives in just two days!

December 21: There always seem to be new activities that the English Association plans and invites me to last minute. This new activity is no exception, but it's quite nice, quite interesting and quite fun. I hope that the students thought so, too.

It was a bit of movie dubbing - students used an app that gave them a short clip of a movie (30-90 seconds) wherein one character's voice was dubbed out, and then they spoke that part as part of a competition. It was quick lively and fun!

December 19: It's just about time for the library on campus here to finally open ... I think.

It was originally slated to open at the beginning of this fall semester, but the time of construction got pushed back a little bit.

Nevertheless, every week something new seems to appear: lights on the steps, finished sidewalks, and the surprise arrival of today... drumroll please ... a huge rock with the Chinese characters "图书馆“ (library) on it, placed in the middle of the steps leading up to the entrance.

I'm not sure if it's intended to stay there forever - it seems like an interesting location for it - but it looks pretty cool... and heavy to move.

December 17: It's the beginning of another week and Christmas is just around the corner; my amazing family sent me a care package with a few decorations to help me celebrate the holidays, and I put them up with a few remnants from last year.

Now, we all know that I don't have any fashion sense and almost as little sense of decoration and style, but I think it's not a half-bad job!

What do you think?

December 15: One of my good friends and fellow PCVs stopped by Wuwei this weekend to visit and explore my home city for these two years. It's almost the end of the 3rd semester, and I finally have my first visitor!

It's an exciting time, and it was a lot of fun to show my school, city and some of my students to a friend.

It was also fun to share all of the great food I love to eat here, and have somebody to make some of it with tonight!

We decided to do a bit of both - pizza, focaccia and beer for dinner; 面皮子 (a type of cold noodle) and a lightly sweetened date tea for breakfast!

December 13: It's sad that globalization and commercialization are really starting to enter (and change) Wuwei. I wrote a month or so ago about how this was evident in the arrival of the Wanda plaza, but it's also been seen in the disappearance of my favorite shopping places: the markets.

The first wet (outdoor) market, the one closest to my apartment and where I had numerous vendor friends, closed a few months back, and the back-up market for me (40 minute walk from my apartment) is set to close at the end of the year, being replaced in the coming years with a tourist attraction. Even now, as I stopped by today, the sellers are sparse and the buyers number even fewer. More and more shopping will have to be done at the supermarkets, which is sad for me, as it removes the element that I loved most: meeting people, chatting, sharing short moments and smiles every day... now, it's just a commercial transaction, and I am hoping that I am able to find a new market somewhere in the city to frequent once the New Year arrives.

December 11: Today, I had an incredibly long day of teaching, essentially teaching from 2:30pm to 9:30pm with only a 25 minute break to run back to my apartment and eat whatever I could find in such a short time. It was stressful, difficult, and I was hungry, so I thought a lot about the good times I've had here, which reminded me of my hot pot night this last weekend.

I was looking through my photos and I found another one I took - usually, I mention/show photos of quail eggs (鹌鹑蛋) when I eat hot pot, for it's one of my favorite foods to eat in hot pot. But I can't ever recall showing a photo of the eggs with the shells... which brings up a few thoughts:

• They're quite beautiful, really, and quite small (there isn't anything in the picture for scale, but they can't be wider than a nickel.
• There must be quite a system in place to produce copious amounts of these eggs, given that one person can eat so many of them in such a short time ...
• It must be a lot of work in a restaurant for someone to peel all of them every single day.

December 9: Yesterday, I had class on my only day of true weekend (I always have class on Sunday), but my students helped me make the most out of the day. In the afternoon yesterday, one of my classes decided to have hot pot together in my apartment, so we went shopping at the store, bought a ton of vegetables, and then spent a few hours preparing, cooking, eating and chatting.

Today they sent me the photo from last night and it's a photo of memory that will outlast my service here for me, and hopefully for them, too. As they call themselves, they are the "English family."

December 7: It's definitely getting colder and colder here in Wuwei, as my students tell me... and the temperatures on my phone's weather app seem to back them up: most days the temperature doesn't quite hit -7 degrees C these days, and at night it gets to about -16 degrees C, so it's a cold, extended night from about 6 pm to 8:30 am.

It's cold enough that going to the market is kind of like playing a game of hide and seek. The vegetables and foods are the hiders, and you are the seeker. What blanket are they hiding under? It's hard to tell.

All of the vendors these days cover all the foods with huge, heavy blankets, and sometimes the vegetables and fruits are still frozen. It's an adventurous trip to the market - but at least my fruits are nice and cool when I get them back home.

December 5: Yesterday I was in the middle of cooking my eggs when I noticed they were just sitting in the pan and not really doing anything. A quick look under the pan confirmed that I was out of gas. It was a bit sad to throw the half cooked eggs in the trash.

Last time this happened it took a week before I could get new gas, but today my counterpart teacher pulled through and got me a replacement in less than a day!

It's a bit strange to think this is my third can of gas in my two years, and I've heard it is probably a bit less safe than ideal to have a giant gas tank in the apartment, but millions of homes are designed this way, and I've never had any problems, so I'll end this run-on sentence by not worrying about it too much.

Here's a look at my old tank... almost takes up half of my kitchen it seems.

December 3: It's another day of firsts for the year - the first snowfall in Wuwei. My colleagues in Lanzhou have been sending pictures every week or so with pictures of the beautiful snow (my students send them all, too), and Wuwei usually switches snowstorms for sandstorms.

Today, we got both! The sandstorm from yesterday continued, but a little bit of snow also started to fall. It might be difficult to tell in the picture, but:

• The dark skies are not from clouds or snow, but from sandstorm pollution;
• There are a few snowflakes drifting in the air, drifting up from below actually as they follow the heat and drafts around the building;
• There's a bit of snow on the green mesh covering the empty ground east of the school, and;
• I'm pretty happy to see some real snow!

December 1: It's the first day of the last month of the year.. the last December I will spend in China. Sometimes, I remember that every day now, is likely to be the last of that day in China for me .. my last Thanksgiving, my last November 30, and so on, and I try not to be sad about that.

Today, however, also happens to be a first for me - a first trip to Tianshui, a first trip to a Gansu PCV Friendsgiving celebration, even if I will be on the train for 16 hours and in Tianshui for about 20 hours.

What's Friendsgiving like? It's a lot of fun ... and a lot of food. Here's a look at about 60% of the spread that was available for about the 30 PCVs and a few friends that showed up to celebrate together. The table kept changing, so in my upcoming blog post about this fantastic weekend, you'll see the same table covered with a different combination of food each time .. but here is a sampler!